Category Archives: Liberty

Tyranny And Technology

Homeland Security, Liberty, Technology, The State

Other than for who will be missing from the event, the “South by Southwest (SXSW)” festival of “technology and innovation,” held in Austin, Texas, holds little interest for this scribe.

The three mighty men who’ll be absent from the venue that was “the launching pad of Twitter and Foursquare” are men who’ve truly used technology to advance the cause of freedom.

“Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, along with Glenn Greenwald, the journalist to whom he leaked his trove of classified government documents,” are scheduled to attend SXSW … but via videoconference.

“If Mr Assange and Mr Snowden were to set foot on US soil, they’d likely be arrested immediately for crimes against national security,” informs BBC News.

Sounds tyrannical to me.

UPDATED: A Reader Loathes Levin, Prefers Libertarians Who Create Oscillation

Constitution, libertarianism, Liberty, Media, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Republicans

ML is annoyed with me because of the column titled “Secession, Not Convention, Offers Salvation.” He writes:

Based on my contacts, Mark Levin doesn’t have a big following in Ohio. I’m surrounded by conservatives, but nobody mentions Levin. Ever. And I grew up here. The only time I ever hear his name is when Sean Hannity mentions it and I turn the dial. To the people I deal with in Ohio, Levin is parochial New York.

I don’t pretend to understand the media environment on the East coast, but, from my experience, your information resonates with people in southwest Ohio. I don’t care about anybody’s opinion. I care about information. You supply great information.

That’s why I suggest you never promote Levin. He’s an establishment tool. Any time you write about him, you elevate him. I prefer you counter his oppression with libertarian arguments, than promote him by name.

BTW, I’m a big, recent fan. I’ve read mises.org for years and lewrockwell.com for a year or so, but you bring a point of view that sometimes contrasts with both. Nice job!

“Secession, Not Convention, Offers Salvation” takes on Levin for his odd idea that we look to the states, which are hardly bastions of freedom, to initiate a constitutional amendment or demand a constitutional convention, when this has never occurred before, and when there is no mechanism to compel Congress to hold such a convention.

MORE.

UPDATE: FACEBOOK thread: Levin is not as simple as all that. Item: he rails against establishment Republicans, hates Bush and Rove, and is seldom asked to go on TV with the teletwits. Levin is not as simple as say, Medved or Prager who are pure establishment.

Ducking Around As Freedoms Go POOF

Constitution, Fascism, Federalism, Founding Fathers, Law, Liberty, The Courts

Face it, the idea of a judiciary that would police the executive as an arm of a self-correcting tripartite government is worse than naive. Rather, it WAS recklessly naive of the American Founding Fathers to imagine that branches of a government, each of whose power is enhanced when the power of the other branches grows, would serve as a check on one another.

Today, Judge William Pauley, “a Clinton appointee to the Southern District of New York,” ruled that “privacy protections enshrined in the fourth amendment of the US constitution needed to be balanced against a government need to maintain a database of records to prevent future terrorist attacks. ‘The right to be free from searches is fundamental but not absolute,’ he said. ‘Whether the fourth amendment protects bulk telephony metadata is ultimately a question of reasonableness.’”

Pauley argued that al-Qaida’s “bold jujitsu” strategy to marry seventh century ideology with 21st century technology made it imperative that government authorities be allowed to push privacy boundaries.

As if the purview of an American justice is to “marry” American law with Islamic ideology; a US judge must apply the constitution to the facts. In truth, any protection the natural law once provided us has been lost, buried under the rubble of legislation, statute, precedents, whatever.

The Guardian:

The judgement, in a case brought before a district court in New York by the American Civil Liberties Union, directly contradicts the result of a similar challenge in a Washington court last week which ruled the NSA’s bulk collection program was likely to prove unconstitutional and was “almost Orwellian” in scale.
Friday’s ruling makes it more likely that the issue will be settled by the US supreme court, although it may be overtaken by the decision of Barack Obama on whether to accept the recommendations of a White House review panel to ban the NSA from directly collecting such data.

There you have the sum of American freedom and federalism: Legislation that flouts the Fourth Amendment is already in place to provide Pauley with all the positive-law backing he needs to justify an anti-Constitutional ruling.

To wit:

The [Judge dismissed the] ACLU case against the NSA … primarily on the grounds that bulk collection was authorised under existing laws allowing “relevant” data collection to be authorised by secret US courts.

And if the Supreme Court doesn’t play (as nicely as Supremo Roberts played for ObamaCare)—there is always an extra-constitutional committee to kill off/override constitutional protections.

As the nation f-cks around with the huckster Ducksters, the ‘privacy protections enshrined in the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution’ just got still weaker, as if this were possible.

UPDATED: Apartheid South Africa: Reality Vs. Libertarian Fantasy

Free Markets, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Liberty, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy, Private Property, South-Africa

“Apartheid South Africa: Reality Vs. Libertarian Fantasy” is the new essay, now on WND. It tackles the “economic reductionism, typical of the impoverished analysis of South Africa, offered so authoritatively by libertarian economists stateside.” Excerpted below are two sections therefrom:

… LITE LIBERTARIANISM VS. THE RIGHT KIND

Herein lies the difference between the paleolibertarian analysis and what this column has termed the lite libertarian one, philosopher Hans-Hermann Hope being the finest example of the former. The rest fall into the latter, lite category.

A crucial difference between lite libertarians and the Right kind is that to the former, the idea of liberty is propositional–a deracinated principle, unmoored from the realities of history, hierarchy, biology, tradition, culture, values.

Conversely, the paleolibertarian grasps that ordered liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the libertarian non-aggression axiom, by which we all must live, cannot endure. “The pursuit of the … paleolibertarian ideal,” explained Catholic philosopher Jack Kerwick, Ph.D., “is the pursuit of an ideal of liberty brought down from the clouds to the nit and the grit of the history and culture from which it emerged.” …

… FREEDOM VS. EGALITARIANISM

Contra the economic reductionism of the lite libertarian, free-market capitalism is a necessary but insufficient condition to sustain freedom in a country of South Africa’s complexion.

The truth absent from the phantasmagorical formulations critiqued is this: Economic freedom does not necessarily reduce so-called wealth inequality. Inegalitarainism is a feature of a free economy. If history is anything to go by, certain minorities will achieve prosperity from poverty, no matter how gravely the state and society impede them. Jews did it in Europe. Levantines and Indians in Africa and the Middle-East. Chinese in southeast Asia and everywhere else they go. Europeans in South Africa.

Moreover, “While all people want safety and sustenance for themselves, not everyone is prepared to allow those whom they dislike and envy to peacefully pursue the same.” (P. 4.) Free-market capitalism is not enough to safeguard ordered liberty in racially riven societies like South Africa, where the majority will always covet the possessions of immensely wealthier minorities and associate these riches with racial privilege.

Ultimately, the rights to life, liberty and private property will forever be imperiled in a country whose constitution has a clause devoted to “Limitation of Rights,” and where redistributive “justice” is a constitutional article of faith. (P. 101)

This, paleolibertarians (all three of us) know too well.

In “The Cannibal” chapter entitled “Saving South Africans S.O.S.,” secession is explored as one solution, it being a species of the private-law society delineated by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Hoppe, of course, has never been afraid to speak to the “unequal civilizing potential” (in James Burnham’s coinage) of different people and peoples. …

Read the complete essay. “Apartheid South Africa: Reality Vs. Libertarian Fantasy” is now on WND.

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UPDATE (12/22): INTERESTING DISCUSSION @ PRAGG.ORG, to which I have replied.